Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum

After that, my grandfather put the drum away. He kept it off the ground, in its own place, of course. He took it out occasionally to visit other drums. He fed it tobacco and water and he made sure that it heard no bad talk and saw no bad sights. But even when the desperately ill or those pleading for the sick begged him to take out that drum, he never would. And as I said, he told me why, he confided in me. He said that he couldn’t be sure of that drum anymore. He told me that the drum itself contained his daughter’s bones. He believed that she was subject, as children are, to rages beyond their control, and that she had caused what happened in the circle. She was angry at the man who took away her mother and caused her own life to end. She had no pity on pitiful Simon Jack.

In the end, though Simon Jack had nearly ruined his life, my grandfather was the only one to take pity on him. The men carried Simon Jack from the circle to my grandfather’s house and laid him out on a bed of pine boughs in the yard. There, the women who care for the dead made a fire that they would keep burning for three days to light the way for his spirit. They washed Simon Jack for burial. As they worked, the rain sprinkled directly down upon them from a clear sky, just as the dead man said it would.

I heard it whispered when I was young, then it was talked about more openly as people forgot who the Pillagers were or why so many had feared Ziigwan’aage. When they prepared Simon Jack, they found the reason he never took those clothes off. It was simple. He couldn’t. The clothes were stitched directly to him. His skin had grown around the threads and beads in some places. The clothes were molded to him in others. The women clipped the clothes carefully from Simon Jack and burned them in a great fire hot enough to consume even the glass beads. They tied his body in birch bark and laid him naked in the ground. He was buried at the entrance to the main path out to the Pillager camp, where those two women would have to step over him whenever they came to town.

Generally, it is, or was, not considered right for a woman to step over anything that belongs to a man. It supposedly gives her power over him. So I don’t know what the women had in mind when they put Simon Jack underground there—perhaps it was a warning or a reminder, or perhaps with the dead the old taboo is reversed. I really don’t know whether Simon Jack’s placement bothered Anaquot or Ziigwan’aage or whether his death made the least difference to them at all. They were to die in the appalling illness that shook our tribe apart. The child alone survived, my father’s half sister, Fleur. And of course there was Niibin’aage, lost into the east by then. As for the drum, it was cared for in the best way possible, as I have said, but it was never used again. I think my grandfather had a conflict in his heart over what to do with it. Once, he told me about the secret location of a cave and he asked me to make sure he was buried there, and the drum with him. Another time he said it should be burned. He also told me that he’d written down songs with some old men and that the drum should be restored to use after forty winters.

My grandfather died unexpectedly. He died before any of these options could be made definite. After his death, when the old men came together to discuss who should take over his songs and feed his guardian spirits, and who should care for his little girl drum, things were disposed of as the old men saw fit. They gave the drum to my father. Perhaps they thought its power would heal him up, sober him. Or maybe they knew he would sell the drum, as eventually he did, to the trader Jewett Parker Tatro for rum and beer. Perhaps they knew how it would happen and they thought that the drum needed to go east, to grow up a little more before it returned. Because the forty years my grandfather spoke of are past. All those afflicted, bothered, or healed and made whole by that drum are gone. Only the songs remain.

Shawnee sat her little brother down and pried the crayon from his strong, chubby fist—it was purple, it looked to him like something good to eat, the name of the crayon was even grape . The feel of the word on her tongue made her mouth water and she wanted a cup of commodity grape juice so terribly: the feeling came over her with such a strong rush that she tasted the cold sweetness of the drink in her mind. Her brother, Apitchi, made a lip-trembling face and then opened his mouth to bawl but Shawnee had a trick she played on him. She reached toward his mouth quickly and tickled his tongue softly with her finger. Usually, he was so surprised that his howl turned into a laugh, but this time he was very, very hungry, truly felt deprived, and in his heart he really knew that the crayon would have been good to eat. So he let blast with a scream of rage that made Shawnee clap her hands over her ears and brought Alice from the other room, where she was curled up under the blankets.

Alice was six years old, way past the toddling age, her legs skinny and bare. All she wore was one of her mother’s old sweatshirts, and it drooped off of her slender body, hanging empty past her fingers and knees. The sweatshirt said University of Phuk U in red block letters, and it was sweatshirt color, gray. Alice’s thick black hair was cut straight off, right below her ears, and it stuck out on both sides of her head like Darth Vader’s helmet in Star Wars . For a while, they had owned that movie, and also a small black TV that had a slot to insert a movie cassette in the bottom, and the movie would come on the screen. But then it had to get sold, and the movie went with it. Before it was sold Shawnee and Alice had watched the movie countless times. They knew it all by heart, every word. Alice rubbed the sleep from her face and watched Apitchi bawl, along with Shawnee. They both just watched him because they knew there was nothing that could be done once he started like this.

“I’m hungry,” said Alice.

“No, you’re not,” said Shawnee, “because there’s nothing.”

Alice nodded and sucked on a finger. She knew that. They had already scraped every particle of oatmeal from the pot that Mama had left on the stove. They had been hungry the day before, and the day before that too. They had wiped the pot with their fingers. Alice’s stomach felt so caved-in she thought maybe it was sticking to the back of her body, and the places that it stuck hurt with stabbing pains. While she was wrapped in the blankets, she had peeled some flecks of paint off the walls and chewed on them like candy.

“I’m cold,” she said.

“No, you’re not,” said Shawnee, “because Mom said don’t turn up the heat there’s just enough to last until she gets home.”

Alice knew that too, and so she put the blankets around her and waited to fall asleep. There was a thick old bearskin on the mattress they had dragged out onto the kitchen–living room floor, dusty and stinking a little, but the fur was the warmest place in the house. Shawnee wished that she could curl up on the bearskin with Alice until Mama came back, but Apitchi was everywhere, into everything. He knew how to climb. He would look for food until he discovered something that he thought he could eat. Shawnee was afraid he would find some kind of poison. She supposed now that it really wouldn’t have hurt him to eat the crayon.

“Maybe I should have let you,” she said gently to his screaming face. “Maybe you would have thought you really ate something.”

Then he screamed again and she felt her hand go back with a sudden jerk. Her hand swept forward so fast she couldn’t stop it from slapping him on the side of the face. The slap made a sharp crack in the air. Apitchi didn’t stop bawling, he only whirled away from Shawnee and ran at the opposite wall, grabbed the one curtain that sagged off a window, pulled until it fell in a brown and white checkered heap. Then he kept running around the room, at one wall then the other, still crying. His shoes fell off. Snot covered his face and then quickly dried to a glaze. Shawnee tossed her long hair back and stood by the kitchen stove, watching him. Her eyes were lovely, dark and slanted in a face shaped like a heart.